Bad Advice on Snowblowers, Generators, and Apples

Since the news business alone doesn't seem to be making enough money to keep New York Times owner Carlos Slim satisfied, the company has been expanding into other areas, like giving advice.

Page A3 of my November 16, 2017, New York Times, under the headline, "Here to Help: Home Maintenance Tips For The Winter, includes the following on how to "make sure your home is prepared for the harsh weather": "Make sure your snow blower is in good working order before it snows. You do not want to be caught in the first major storm with only an orange shovel to dig yourself out."

The Times doesn't seem to have considered the possibility that some of its readers live in apartments, or dormitories. Or, if they own homes, they have small sidewalks or driveways and choose to use shovels because they are quieter and more environmentally friendly. A shovel, unlike a gas-powered snowblower, doesn't contribute to global climate change or fund Saudi-backed terrorism or Russian political adventurism. Or maybe some Times readers prefer not to own their own snow blowers, but to hire someone with a plow to come clear their driveway. Maybe some Times readers have their own plows on the front of their own pickup trucks, parked in their driveways that are too long for a snowblower. The whole thing is just presumptuous, and it verges on bad advice.

The same article goes on: "A portable generator can provide you with a lifeline in a blackout. Power it up every three months, and have it serviced twice a year (even if you never use it)." Again, the Times doesn't consider that some of its readers live in urban apartments where there is barely room to store a non-collapsible colander, let alone a generator that "you never use." The environmental consequences of needlessly powering up a generator every three months also go unconsidered. And what sort of lives does the Times imagine its readers to have, that they have the spare time and spare cash to spend on twice-annual service calls for a never-used portable generator? Of the thousand-plus Times newsroom employees, how many of them are skipping work twice a year to stay home and wait for the portable-generator service guy to show up and get paid to have a look at the generator they never use?

The advice runs under the headline "here to help," but it's not actually helpful advice. It's actually unhelpful advice, because it creates anxiety — "My gosh, I only had the portable generator serviced once this year, instead of twice"; "How can we save for college and retirement and also pay for organic produce and my costly New York Times subscription when all our disposable income is being consumed by the twice-annual servicing of our portable generator that we never use?"

This "here to help" feature has been running for months, maybe even years, now, but the Times still hasn't updated the "Today's Paper" page of the website to include a digital version of it. The article that ran in print seems to be a highly abbreviated version of this "annual home maintenance checklist."

For Times readers who have time left over after maintaining their portable generators and snowblowers, the newspaper's health column has another job to saddle them with:

If you buy conventional apples, wash them in a solution of baking soda and water. A recent study by Dr. He, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, found baking soda solution was more effective than either plain water or a bleach solution at removing pesticide residues from the surface of the peels, but the fruit had to be immersed for up to 15 minutes before being rinsed.

Even then, washing didn't remove pesticide residues that had penetrated deep into the peel or through the peel to the flesh of the fruit.

Again, this is bad advice. How many Times newsroom employees are washing every piece of non-organic fruit they buy for 15 minutes in a baking soda and water solution? How do they have time left over to live the rest of their lives? The Times column contradicts another recent Times column, by Aaron Carroll, who concluded, "If there's one thing you should cut from your diet, it's fear."

I asked Dr. Carroll on Twitter what he made of the pesticide column and he wrote back, in part, "There's no evidence of harm." I'm pretty sure he was referring to the pesticide residues, not the 15-minute baking-soda bath for each piece of fruit. Dr. Carroll also recommended his new book, The Bad Food Bible: How And Why To Eat Sinfully. It would probably make good reading while you are waiting for the portable-generator servicing guy to show up, or for the 15 minutes to run out on the timer for the baking-soda apple bath.

receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free smartertimes.com mailing list